Infosys cofounder backing two projects -one to help school children and the other from eGovernments Foundation

Just a few months after going down in a hard-fought Lok Sabha election campaign, Nandan Nilekani is back in his garage incubating new ideas. This time the Infosys cofounder and former CEO is backing two projects -one to help school children at the primary level to develop reading and writing skills using tablets and the other is an intelligent software application that revives his old government technology organisation --eGovernments Foundation.

The eGovernments Foundation, cofounded in 2003 by Nilekani, is being reinvigorated with fresh funding and some new backers. Last month, the Omidyar Network made a grant of $1 mil ` 6 crore) to the foundalion (.tion, with Nilekani topping that up with around ` . 3 crore.CV Madhukar, who leads Omidyar's Government Transparency investments, has joined the foundation's board.

Nat Malupillai, a Cornell University graduate who worked as director technology at Target until recently, has also joined as the CEO of eGovernments.

“Data-driven governance is our mission,“ said Srikanth Nadhamuni, the cofounder of eGovernments and a former head of technology at the Unique Identification Authority of India whose chairman was Nilekani.

With the new funding, the foundation's team of engineers and designers is putting together two new products called Smart City Dashboard and Smart City Mobility. Using a dashboard screen that reflects the progress across key municipal
processes with different colours and visually appealing charts, Nilekani and Nadhamuni are attempting to make it “a flat world“ for government decision makers.

Already, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has shown interest when he visited the foundation's office a week ago.“Nandan has personally been participating in discussions and helping us with specific suggestions,“ Nadhamuni said.

Out of public spotlight now, Nilekani is coauthoring his next book `Rebooting Government' along with Viral Shah, a computer scientist who co-created a new programming language Julia from scratch. The book is expected to be out in December and will contain ideas on crowdsourcing, hackathons and app ecosystems that can help build more efficient government systems.

“I like to believe that we are trying to be the catalysts of helping government offer services to people without corruption,“ said Malupillai, the new CEO of the foundation.

“What we are trying to do is to take this lead, and then make other market players enter this space and help local bodies deliver services without corruption,“ he said.

After Nilekani lost the elections on a Congress ticket, the future of the project was uncertain. However, the Modi-led BJP government decided to back the UIDAI and set aside `. 2,000 crore for the project in its maiden budget.

The primary school project, which will help students develop reading and writing skills through interactive software application, is being piloted across several schools, but the details are not available.